Animal Crossing: New Horizons has become a phenomenon. If you’re not playing it, you’re probably still seeing it everywhere you turn – on Twitter, on Twitch, on the lips of your friends discussing turnip prices. It’s likely enough to inspire FOMO, the fear of missing out.

There are a couple of Animal Crossing adjacent games available on PC. Stardew Valley is one which comes instantly to mind, and other games like Stardew Valley. If you want to truly capture the spirit of Animal Crossing, however, there’s a surprising contender: Red Dead Redemption 2.

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As I said last time, my favourite thing about Red Dead Redemption 2 is the fact you can treat the game as an extremely perilous wildlife-spotting sim, with new creatures to behold every time you enter a new corner of the Cowboy’s grotty, whiskey-stained world. Some 234 creatures, in fact. And as a mark of respect, largely to the concept of animals but also to the Cowboy, I’m writing short reviews of all of them. Last time I managed twenty, so there’s only 214 left to go! Beast mode engaged.

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“Found my own body floating down the river today. Didn’t recognise myself for ages.” This may sound like the start of a magical realist detective story, rather than something you’d say in a meeting with colleagues. But in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is rapidly emerging as an unlikely competitor to Zoom and Skype in the world of conference calling, this is business as usual.

I’ve long been a fan of the way the Cowboy Game – especially its multiplayer mode – mixes obsessive realism with glitchiness and ultraviolence to create a sense of weird, unreal melancholy. But writer, illustrator and good tweeter Viv Schwarz, who related the above anecdote to me, has discovered that this recipe was missing a crucial third ingredient: corporate culture. They’ve been meeting with workmates in the uncanny environs of RDR2 for some time now, and while they can’t swear blind that it’s the most efficient place to do business, it is at least not Zoom. So grab yourself a seat by the fire and a rusty tin of hawk viscera, and let’s action some deliverables.

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Whenever I return to Red Dead Redemption 2, I find myself wanting to be released from the shackles of Rockstar’s design. Much like the Van der Linde gang, I’m looking for a place of my own, one that’s free from the concerns and constraints imposed by The Man. So I turn to mods, where I can make the west wild again.

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Y’all still riding horses out there? It’s 1899, son, get with the times. A new, in-development Red Dead Redemption 2 mod has opened the stables to all manner of wild bears, boars cougars and more. After all, there ain’t a sight in the West more terrifying than a grim outlaw with a fistful of bullets, nothing to lose, and 500 pounds of furious pork under his saddle.

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Red Dead Redemption 2

is a game drowning in details, with its attempt to capture a simulated vision of an American west that’s been gone for 120 years, down to every last shell casing, spittoon stain and sweat-crusted saddlebag. Probably my favourite thing about it all, however, is the obsessive, noachian fervour with which the natural world has been catalogued. There are some 234 animals in the game, with surprisingly few of them sharing the same models, and many interacting with each other in an impressive (if surface level) facsimiles of natural behaviour. 234! That’s nearly three times> the number in Planet Zoo, which is a game entirely about animals. Not a bad job at all.

Anyway, I’m going to review all of them. Let’s go.

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All good things must come to an end. Fortunately for our souls, this maxim also applies to the adventures of disgusting Cowboys. After beasting herons, strangling cops, and drowning in swamps during what became the very darkest segment of the RPS Christmas livestream, it was finally time to hang up my snake-wrecking boots, drink my last tin of poorly-preserved, lukewarm peaches, and log out of Red Dead Redemption 2.

But before that, a change of pace. I can’t help but feel that, after the sinus-bursting, turtle-stabbing atrocities of the last two episodes of Rowdy Pardner, you have deserved a little respite at the end of your journey. And so, in this last of our series of three short documentary films, we’re going to focus our hearts not on the business of fists, but on the matters of the mind. So put on your learnin’ chaps, load your sixshooter with thought-slugs, and let’s mosey on down to the education saloon – for it is time to reveal some True Cowboy Facts. If you are lucky, you may even experience the Cowboy looking directly through your screen and speaking them to you.

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Smash cut to: the vile, spluttering face of the Cowboy, who is drowning in a swamp. As his strength gives out and his legs stop kicking, those craggy features slip at last below the surface, turning sepia in the murk before vanishing entirely. A shaking hand, still crusted with alligator blood, claws for the sky as it follows him under. Then he is gone. His only memorial is a trio of bubbles, that wobble to the surface and burst in a puff of whiskey vapour. He died, apparently, because he could not take cocaine while swimming.

Howdy folks! It s time for the second episode in this series of short films following my adventures through the grim darkness of Red Dead Redemption 2, as I led Matthew and Dave into Cowboy Purgatory during the RPS Christmas livestream. Last time, we went on what was billed as a nature tour, but which rapidly descended into a one-man mass extinction, despite my best intentions going in. This time, we’re headed to the Big City.

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Just before Christmas, the RPS Treehouse got together for a marathon livestream to raise money for the British Red Cross. There was a Nidhogg tournament, a session of Blindfolded Hitman 2, and even a thrilling bout of competitive MS Paint. My role in all of this, however, was a bit more rustic. I was summoned from my homestead in the Wild West Midlands, armed only with a head full of dreams and a saddlebag full of tinned peaches, to play some good ol Red Dead Redemption 2.

It all started so wholesomely. The Cowboy Game (to call it by its true name) is famed for its obsessively recreated Western landscapes – and for the legions of beautifully modelled critters and varmints which populate them. And since you can t say Nature without also saying Nate , Video Sheriff Matthew thought I d be the perfect guide for a nice, relaxing wildlife tour through this digital wilderness. Alas, no plan survives contact with the Cowboy, and soon enough, the only nature involved was the cry of Nate, ur treating that alligator horribly , from horrified observer Alice Liguori.

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